Went ahead and dropped the dough for a year subscription to YouTube Premium because like, I mean, I give Cohost money and I undeniably spend way more time watching YouTube than I do scrolling Cohost, and a YT Premium subscription offers immediate and noticeable quality of life improvements (background playback, higher bitrates, offline download, zero ads on mobile) so I just said what the hell.
I will say I immediately feel like YouTube is noticeably nicer to use, holy crap. Normal YouTube is so deeply infested with ads that I've trained my brain to block out that it almost feels off-putting to have the app be this content-dense. The whole screen is the stuff you care about! Zero percent is wasted on ads! It may just be a psychological thing but the app feels faster. I'd wager it probably is, in a directly measurable sense, as one spends less time scrolling and working around ads, and app spends less time loading them.
Google bad yes of course but YouTube is something I use so regularly that I really have no problem paying for these improvements. Especially since it finally makes it feel like a finished, complete product. We could talk all day about how fucked up it is that we allow ourselves to be subjected to provably awful experiences because companies want to gouge us for cash to make them stop torturing us, and yes I hate to report that the Chinese water torture of constant ads did finally break me, but I will say I do not regret this purchase at all. I do in fact feel happier now that I'm not being subjected to the Chinese water torture.
